Excession

For those who wished to await that judgment day without having to live through every other day in between, Storage was the answer, as it was for others, for all those other reasons.

The rate of technological change in the Culture, at least at the level which directly affected the humans within it, was fairly modest. For mille

The Sleeper Service — which was not called that then — had simply been the first ship fully to take advantage of this development. When it Stored people it usually did so in small tableaux after the ma

Back then, the GSV had been called the Quietly Confident, and it had been run, as ships of that class normally were, by not one but three Minds. What happened next depended on who you believed.

The official version was that when one of the three Minds had decided it wanted to quit the Culture the other two Minds had argued with it and then made the unusual decision to leave the structure of the GSV to the single dissenting Mind, rather than, as would have been more normal, just giving it a smaller ship.

The perhaps more plausible and certainly more interesting rumour was that there had been a good old-fashioned wing-ding battle between the Minds, two against one, and the two had lost, very much against the odds. The two losing Minds had been kicked out, taking to commandeered GCUs like officers given life boats after a mutiny. And that was why, this version went, the whole of the Quietly Confident — which promptly renamed itself the Sleeper Service, had been turned over to the single dissident Mind; it hadn't been some gentlepeople's agreement; it had been a revolution.

Whatever version you chose to believe, it was no secret that the Culture proper had chosen to dedicate another, smaller, GSV to the task of following the Sleeper Service wherever it went, presumably to keep an eye on it.

Following its renaming, and paying no apparent heed to the craft now tailing it, the Sleeper Service's next step was to evacuate everybody else remaining aboard. Most of the ships had already gone, and the rest were asked to leave. Then the drones, aliens and all the human perso

After that the ship went in search of others (and one other in particular), and let it be known throughout the Culture, through its information network, that it was willing to travel anywhere to pick up those who might wish to join it, so long as they were in Storage and happy to be set amongst one of its tableaux.

People were reluctant at first; this was definitely the sort of behaviour that earned a ship the title Eccentric, and Eccentric ships had been known to do odd, even dangerous things. Still, the Culture had its share of brave souls, and a few took up the craft's strange invitation, without apparent ill effect. When the first few people who had been Stored aboard the GSV were safely returned on the realisation of their revival criteria, again without seeming to have suffered for the strangeness of their temporary lodgings, the slow trickle of adventurous individuals began to turn into a steady stream of slightly perverse or just romantic ones; as the reputation of the Sleeper Service spread, and it released holograms of its more and more ambitious tableaux (important historical incidents, then small battles and details from greater conflicts), so more and more people thought it rather amusing to be Stored within this eccentric Eccentric, where they might be said to be forming part of a work of art even while they slept, rather than just plonked in a boring box somewhere underneath their local Plate.

And so taking a ride aboard the Sleeper Service as a kind of vicariously wandering soul became nothing less than fashionable, and the ship slowly filled with undead people in Storage suits whom it posed into larger and larger scenes, until eventually it was able to tackle whole battlefields and lay them out in the sixteen square kilometres of territory it possessed in each of its General Bays.

Amorphia completed its sweeping gaze across the bright, silent stillness of the vast killing ground. As an avatar it possessed no real thoughts of its own, but the Mind that was the Sleeper Service liked to run the creature off a small sub-routine that was only a little more intelligent than the average human being — while both retaining the option of stepping in, full force, if it needed to and making the avatar behave in a confused, distracted state that the ship believed somehow reflected, on the nearly infinitely smaller human scale, its own philosophical perplexities.

So it was that the semi-human sub-routine looked out across that great tableau, and felt a kind of sadness that it might all have to be dismantled. There was an extra, perhaps deeper melancholy at the thought that it would no longer be able to play host to the living things aboard; the creatures of the sea and the air and the gas-giant atmosphere, and the woman.

Its thoughts turned to that woman; Dajeil Gelian, who in one sense had been the cause, the seed for all of this, and the one person it had wanted to find, the one soul — asleep or awake — it had been determined to offer sanctuary to when it had first renounced the Culture's normality. Now that sanctuary was compromised, and she too would have to be offloaded with all the rest of its waifs and strays and teeming undead. A promise being fulfilled leading to a promise to her being broken, as though she had not experienced enough of that in her life. Still, it would make amends, and for that reason there were a lot of other promises being made and — so far, it would seem — kept. That would have to do.

Movement on the motionless tableau; Amorphia turned its attention there and saw the black bird Gravious flapping away across the field. More movement. Amorphia walked towards it, around and over the poised, charging cavalry and the fallen soldiers, between a pair of convincing-looking hanging fountains of earth where two ca

This was unusual; people normally wanted to be woken back in their home and in the presence of friends, but over the last couple of decades — as the tableaux had become more impressive — more people had wished to be brought back to life here, in the midst of them.

Amorphia squatted down by the woman, who had been lying posed as a dying soldier, her tunic punctured by bullet holes and stained red. She lay on her back, blinking in the sunlight, attended by machines. The head of the Storage suit had been slipped off and lay like a rubbery mask on the grass beside her; her face looked pale and just a little blotchy; she was an old woman, but her depilated head gave her a curious, baby-like quality of nakedness.